Cataract influence on iris recognition performance

This paper presents the experimental study revealing weaker performance of the automatic iris recognition methods for cataract-affected eyes when compared to healthy eyes. There is little research on the topic, mostly incorporating scarce databases that are often deficient in images representing more than one illness. We built our own database, acquiring 1288 eye images of 37 patients of the Medical University of Warsaw. Those images represent several common ocular diseases, such as cataract, along with less ordinary conditions, such as iris pattern alterations derived from illness or eye trauma. Images were captured in near-infrared light (used in biometrics) and for selected cases also in visible light (used in ophthalmological diagnosis). Since cataract is a disorder that is most populated by samples in the database, in this paper we focus solely on this illness. To assess the extent of the performance deterioration we use three iris recognition methodologies (commercial and academic solutions) to calculate genuine match scores for healthy eyes and those influenced by cataract. Results show a significant degradation in iris recognition reliability manifesting by worsening the genuine scores in all three matchers used in this study (12% of genuine score increase for an academic matcher, up to 175% of genuine score increase obtained for an example commercial matcher). This increase in genuine scores affected the final false non-match rate in two matchers. To our best knowledge this is the only study of such kind that employs more than one iris matcher, and analyzes the iris image segmentation as a potential source of decreased reliability

Iris Recognition Under Biologically Troublesome Conditions - Effects of Aging, Diseases and Post-mortem Changes

This paper presents the most comprehensive analysis of iris recognition reliability in the occurrence of various biological processes happening naturally and pathologically in the human body, including aging, illnesses, and post-mortem changes to date. Insightful conclusions are offered in relation to all three of these aspects. Extensive regression analysis of the template aging phenomenon shows that differences in pupil dilation, combined with certain quality factors of the sample image and the progression of time itself can significantly degrade recognition accuracy. Impactful effects can also be observed when iris recognition is employed with eyes affected by certain eye pathologies or (even more) with eyes of the deceased subjects. Notably, appropriate databases are delivered to the biometric community to stimulate further research in these utterly important areas of iris biometrics studies. Finally, some open questions are stated to inspire further discussions and research on these important topics. To Authors' best knowledge, this is the only scientific study of iris recognition reliability of such a broad scope and novelty.Comment: Accepted manuscript version of the BIOSIGNALS 2017 pape

Database of iris images acquired in the presence of ocular pathologies and assessment of iris recognition reliability for disease-affected eyes

This paper presents a database of iris images collected from disease affected eyes and an analysis related to the influence of ocular diseases on iris recognition reliability. For that purpose we have collected a database of iris images acquired for 91 different eyes during routine ophthalmology visits. This collection gathers samples for healthy eyes as well as those with various eye pathologies, including cataract, acute glaucoma, posterior and anterior synechiae, retinal detachment, rubeosis iridis, corneal vascularization, corneal grafting, iris damage and atrophy and corneal ulcers, haze or opacities. To our best knowledge this is the first database of such kind that will be made publicly available. In the analysis the data were divided into five groups of samples presenting similar anticipated impact on iris recognition: 1) healthy (no impact), 2) unaffected, clear iris (although the illness was detected), 3) geometrically distorted irides, 4) distorted iris tissue and 5) obstructed iris tissue. Three different iris recognition methods (MIRLIN, VeriEye and OSIRIS) were then used to find differences in average genuine and impostor comparison scores calculated for healthy eyes and those impacted by a disease. Specifically, we obtained significantly worse genuine comparison scores for all iris matchers and all disease-affected eyes when compared to a group of healthy eyes, what have a high potential of impacting false non-match rate

Assessment of iris recognition reliability for eyes affected by ocular pathologies

This paper presents an analysis of how the iris recognition is impacted by eye diseases and an appropriate dataset comprising 2996 iris images of 230 distinct eyes (including 184 illness-affected eyes representing more than 20 different eye conditions). The images were collected in near infrared and visible light during a routine ophthalmological practice. The experimental study shows four valuable results. First, the enrollment process is highly sensitive to those eye conditions that make the iris obstructed or introduce geometrical distortions. Second, even those conditions that do not produce visible changes to the iris structure may increase the dissimilarity among samples of the same eyes. Third, eye conditions affecting iris geometry, its tissue structure or producing obstructions significantly decrease the iris recognition reliability. Fourth, for eyes afflicted by a disease, the most prominent effect of the disease on iris recognition is to cause segmentation errors. To our knowledge this is the first database of iris images for disease-affected eyes made publicly available to researchers, and the most comprehensive study of what we can expect when the iris recognition is deployed for non-healthy eyes.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication at IEEE BTAS 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.0016